Inspiring Hands-On Learning
In June of 1916, facing challenges with overcrowding and recognizing a need for more space to accommodate the educational needs brought by new technologies and scientific advances, MIT packed up its laboratories and classrooms that had been scattered in buildings across Boston’s Back Bay and crossed the Charles River to settle into its new Cambridge campus.
The move was celebrated with a dedication and three days of events, which included the first public display of the Wright Brothers’ 1903 Flyer. The display, arranged by Lester D. Gardner SB 1898, was located in the site of MechE’s relocated Steam Laboratory, in what it is, today, the basement and mezzanine level of Building 3.
Professor Sangbae Kim’s Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory is one of the labs now located in this space. Before moving into his lab, however, Kim happened upon an historic photo showing the biplane on exhibit. He keeps a print of the photo hanging on the wall in his lab.
“This photo actually is very meaningful – it’s not just a cool historic image,” says Kim. “If you look at it through the lens of the early 1900s, this photo is a reminder of what MIT stands for – the soul and DNA of MIT, mind and hand, this is a place where you experiment. This is a place where we build and test.”
Orville and Wilbur Wright’s 1903 Flyer achieved its first flight on December 17, 1903. The flight lasted 12 seconds, traveled 120 feet, and reached a top speed of 6.8 miles per hour – and it changed the course of history. With that flight, the Wright Brothers ushered in the aerial age and established the foundations of aeronautical engineering.
Kim, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Mechanical Engineering, is not an aeronautical engineer – his lab focuses on designing and controlling bio-inspired robots using insights taken from the natural world – but the practices he wants students to learn and incorporate into their work have origins rooted in the same approaches used by the Wright Brothers.
The Wright Brothers were skilled mechanics. Before they began building aircraft, they built bicycles – planning, designing, and fabricating nearly every part, and learning from the process, which helped inform their aviation experiments. For example, bicycles are highly unstable but controllable machines, which helped them conclude that an airplane could also be unstable yet controllable.
Kim says hands-on experimentation is disappearing from some disciplines today in favor of simulation, which he considers a major loss. He says he believes students learn best when they can “feel the equation.”
“Simulations can be great – they can, for example, save money and time, but there are a lot of things you can’t simulate, you have to verify with experiments,” says Kim, citing his work in robotics. “There are a lot of things you can’t understand until you actually feel your robot behave a certain way, then you can connect that with the equation.”
Kim says this is what MIT’s mission, “mens et manus,” mind and hand, is all about. It’s not about creating teams where some individuals have a command of the “mind” piece, and others carry out “hand” tasks, but rather to empower each individual to actively understand physical concepts through different representations – equation, force, visuals, data, and more – in a connected way, so that mind and hand are one. “We shouldn’t lose that spirit, and the picture is a reminder of that spirit,” he says.
According to the Smithsonian Institute, the 1916 exhibition at MIT marked the first time the Wright Flyer had been uncrated and assembled since it flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Orville Wright personally attended MIT’s campus dedication celebration. The biplane made several stops in the years that followed, before landing a permanent home in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. in 1948. In December 2003, a replica of the plane was erected on top of the Great Dome by student hackers, in honor of the 100th anniversary of human-powered flight.
MIT’s wind tunnel, now a “modern subsonic, continuous-flow, closed-return tunnel” still bears the Wright Brothers’ name.